Recent Latin American cultural and political magazines have noted the trend of postmodernity in the literature of the region, with a range of responses. Some critics consider it a foreign importation and sign of cultural imperialism. Others feel that postmodernism reflects a culture of mass media manipulated by the dominating classes. But the debate has been particularly headed by a new group of young writers who consider themselves postmodern and politically progressive: Severo Sarduy of Cuba, Diamela Eltit of Chile, and R.H. Moreno-Duran of Colombia, among others. By examining a group of the most representative innovative writers active today, Williams argues that the postmodern novel in Latin America is as political and valuable as its more traditional and modern predecessors.

Women's Experimental Writing considers six contemporary authors who use experimental methods and negative modes of critique in their fiction and feminism. The authors covered are Valerie Solanas, Kathy Acker, Theresa Cha, Chantel Chawaf, Jeanette Winterson, and Lynda Barry. These writers all share a commitment to combining extreme content with formally radical techniques in order to enact varieties of gender, sex, race, class and nation-based experience that, they suggest, may only be "represented" accurately through the experimental unmaking of dominant structures of rationality. Ellen Berry extends the anti-social negative critique predominant in queer studies by offering an alternative archive of feminist negative literary practices and explores the consequences of joining an anti-social critique with radical innovations in literary and cultural forms. She argues that the radical aesthetic practices the authors employ are central to the emergence of contemporary Western feminisms and in doing so rectifies a critical neglect of contemporary experimental writing by women, especially in politicized forms, within the still-emerging postmodern canon.

John Peters investigates the impact of Impressionism on Conrad and links this to his literary techniques as well as his philosophical and political views. Impressionism, Peters argues, enabled Conrad to encompass both surface and depth not only in visually perceived phenomena but also in his narratives and objects of consciousness, be they physical objects, human subjects, events or ideas. Conrad and Impressionism investigates the sources and implications of Conrad's impressionism in order to argue for a consistent link among his literary technique, philosophical presuppositions and socio-political views.

An engagement with the continued importance of modernism is vital for building a nuanced account of the development of the novel after 1945. Bringing together internationally distinguished scholars of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, these essays reveal how the most innovative writers working today draw on the legacies of modernist literature. Dynamics of influence and adaptation are traced in dialogues between authors from across the twentieth century: Lawrence and A. S. Byatt, Woolf and J. M. Coetzee, Forster and Zadie Smith. The book sets out new critical and disciplinary foundations for rethinking the very terms we use to map the novel's progression and renewal, enhancing our understanding not only of what modernism was but also what it might still become. With its global reach, The Legacies of Modernism will appeal to scholars working not only in the new modernist studies, but also in postcolonial studies and comparative literature.

Conversations with Gish Jen is the first collection of interviews with the renowned contemporary American author Gish Jen (b. 1955), whose acclaimed fiction and nonfiction have fascinated American readers for more than thirty years. The conversations in this book offer first-hand information not only about Jen's authorial intentions, but also about her life as a daughter of Chinese immigrants. Spanning more than two decades, beginning in 1991 and ending with a new, unpublished interview from 2017, these interviews provide readers a sense of Jen's development as a novelist and cultural critic. Jen's insights into the merits and drawbacks of Eastern and Western cultures, including American individualism and exceptionalism and Asian interdependent mindset and living principles, provide us with keys to understanding the identity struggles of the author herself as well as her fictional characters. The comparative approach Jen adopts in her comments on such topics as education, politics, business, religion, and concepts of creativity and success provokes readers to reflect on their relationships with themselves, with the society in which they live, and with the rest of the world. At the heart of these conversations is Jen's sense of humor, which makes the book a joyful read for both scholars and casual fans of her work.

A collection of the work of Uwe Johnson. It includes "Speculations about Jakob," a Faulknerian novel; selections from "Anniversaries: From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl"; Anniversaries II: From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl"; and the writer's essay on the Anniversaries."

Through a discussion of diverse art and media such as apocalyptic thrillers, rap, and television, Swirski debunks the American political system, sieving out fact from a sea of bipartisan untruths. Engaging with close analysis and multiple case studies, this book forges a more accurate picture of contemporary American culture and of America itself.

Modernism both influenced and was fascinated by the rhetorical and aesthetic manifestations of fascism. In examining how four artists and writers represented fascist leaders, Annalisa Zox-Weaver aims to achieve a more complex understanding of the modernist political imagination. She examines how photographer Lee Miller, filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, writer Gertrude Stein and journalist Janet Flanner interpret, dramatize and exploit Hitler, Goering and Petain. Within their own artistic medium, each of these modernists explore confrontations between private and public identity, and historical narrative and the construction of myth. This study makes use of extensive archival material, such as letters, photographs, journals, unpublished manuscripts and ephemera, and includes ten illustrations. This interdisciplinary perspective opens up wider discussions of the relationship between artists and dictators, modernism and fascism, and authority and representation.

Here, Bjorklund shows that Swedish literary discourses on lesbianism provocatively contrast with a widely accepted view that attitudes toward homosexuality have gradually become more tolerant. The lasting power of negative discourses upends the assumption that Sweden's progressive laws reflect progressive attitudes toward homosexuality."

Harold Pinter is universally described as "Britain's leading dramatist." This book evaluates the justification for this appellation. It examines his work in relation to changes taking place in the New British Theatre after the so-called theatrical revolution of 1956, and draws attention to those autobiographical experiences that have been transmuted into his art. Beginning with a look at the nature of British theatre prior to 1956, Peacock then describes Pinter's early life in the East End of London, his career as an actor, and his early writing. The discussion follows Pinter's life and work from The Room in 1957 to his most recent play, Ashes to Ashes in 1996. The author argues that although Pinter has not instigated an aesthetic revolution, he has, more significantly, through his representation of human behavior, provoked a new way of viewing the world.

This book explores how recent football fiction has negotiated the decisive political developments in English football after the 1989/90 publication of the 'Taylor Report'. A direct response to the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster and growing concerns of hooliganism, the 'Taylor Report' suggested a number of measures for stricter regulation of fan crowds. In consequence, stadiums in the top divisions were turned into all-seated venues and were put under CCTV surveillance. The implementation of these measures reduced violent incidents drastically, but it also led to an unparalleled increase in ticket prices, which in turn significantly altered the demographics of the crowd. This development, which also enabled football's entry into other mainstream cultural forms, changed the game decisively. Piskurek traces patterns across prose and film to detect how these fictions have responded to the changed circumstances of post-Taylor football. Lending a cultural lens to these political changes, this book is pioneering in its analysis of football fiction as a whole, offering a fresh perspective to a range of scholars and students interested in cultural studies, sociology, leisure and politics.

In the decades following World War II, many American Jews sought to downplay their difference, as a means of assimilating into Middle America. Yet a significant minority, including many prominent Jewish writers and intellectuals, clung to their ethnic difference, using it to register dissent with the status quo and act as spokespeople for non-white America. In this provocative book, Jennifer Glaser examines how racial ventriloquism became a hallmark of Jewish-American fiction, as Jewish writers asserted that their own ethnicity enabled them to speak for other minorities. Rather than simply condemning this racial ventriloquism as a form of cultural appropriation or commending it as an act of empathic imagination, Borrowed Voices offers a nuanced analysis of the technique, judiciously assessing both its limitations and its potential benefits. Glaser considers how the practice of racial ventriloquism has changed over time, examining the books of many well-known writers, including Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, Saul Bellow, and many others. Bringing Jewish studies into conversation with critical race theory, Glaser also opens up a dialogue between Jewish-American literature and other forms of media, including films, magazines, and graphic novels. Moreover, she demonstrates how Jewish-American fiction can help us understand the larger anxieties about ethnic identity, authenticity, and authorial voice that emerged in the wake of the civil rights movement.

In this study of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, Lawrence Miller traces Beckett's attempt to voice the expressive dilemma that is posed by the assumptions of modernist art and art criticism. A preliminary examination of Beckett's critical writings on literature and painting reveals a growing suspicion of modernist ambitions; it is the trilogy of novels, however, which represents Beckett's most sustained rejection of the feasible aspirations of an expressive theory of art. Still, the goal of expression cannot be abandoned since it represents the essence of the human condition; the compulsion inevitably triumphs over the longing to end.

Negotiating Feminisms examines intergenerational feminism in Chicanx family life. It analyses literary representations of the ways that Chicanas negotiate feminisms in the family across generations, through the maintenance, contestation, and adaptation of traditional gender roles. Using an original theoretical lens of negotiation to read the works of Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros, this book unpacks intergenerational resistance to patriarchal oppression. This book shows how the works of Cisneros and Castillo articulate a politics of negotiation that critiques the gendered ideologies and roles of the family. In doing so, the book's discussion not only engages with literary representations but also connects these representations to the contextual experience of Chicanx family life. This book calls for a rethinking of women characters beyond limited, and limiting, familial roles and uses the framework of feminist negotiation as a means to explore the empowering possibilities of intergenerational female relationships.

London's literary and cultural scene fostered newly configured forms of feminist anticolonialism during the modernist period. Through their writing in and about the imperial metropolis, colonial women authors not only remapped the city, they also renegotiated the position of women within the empire. This book examines the significance of gender to the interwoven nature of empire and modernism. As transgressive figures of modernity, writers such as Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, Una Marson and Sarojini Naidu brought their own versions of modernity to the capital, revealing the complex ways in which colonial identities 'traveled' to London at the turn of the twentieth century. Anna Snaith's original study provides an alternative vantage point on the urban metropolis and its artistic communities for scholars and students of literary modernism, gender and postcolonial studies, and English literature more broadly.

In southern graveyards through the first decades of the twentieth century, the Confederate South was commemorated by tombstones and memorials, in Confederate flags, and in Memorial Day speeches and burial rituals. Cemeteries spoke the language of southern memory, and identity was displayed in ritualistic form--inscribed on tombs, in texts, and in bodily memories and messages. Katharine DuPre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray wove sites of regional memory, particularly Confederate burial sites, into their autobiographies as a way of emphasizing how segregation divided more than just southern landscapes and people.

Darlene O'Dell here considers the southern graveyard as one of three sites of memory--the other two being the southern body and southern memoir--upon which the region's catastrophic race relations are inscribed. O'Dell shows how Lumpkin, Smith, and Murray, all witnesses to commemorations of the Confederacy and efforts to maintain the social order of the New South, contended through their autobiographies against Lost Cause versions of southern identity. Sites of Southern Memory elucidates the ways in which these three writers joined in the dialogue on regional memory by placing the dead southern body as a site of memory within their texts.

In this unique study of three women whose literary and personal lives were vitally concerned with southern race relations and the struggle for social justice, O'Dell provides a telling portrait of the troubled intellectual, literary, cultural, and social history of the American South.

This work explores this crucial period in the development of the English novel, integrating critical theory, historical background and close reading. Divided into two major sections, the first shows how historical and contextual material is essential for developing powerful readings. Thus the first part challenges such New Critical tenets as "exit author" and the "biographical fallacy" and discusses how the author becomes a formal presence in the text.;The second section is theoretical and speaks of the transformation in the way that we read and think about authors, readers, characters and form in the light of recent theory, offering an alternative to the deconstructive and Marxist trends in literary studies.

Franz Xaver Kroetz -- banana-cutter, hospital orderly, fledgling actor and, more significantly, Germany's most popular contemporary dramatist of the seventies and early eighties. This study, which situates Kroetz's aesthetics in a political context, focuses on four plays that mark crisis points in his development of a political aesthetic. The breaks in otherwise very successful aesthetic models occur as Kroetz responds to changing social conditions.All those interested in Kroetz, as well as in broader aesthetic questions, will find that this book makes important breakthroughs.

This work provides a wealth of information on obscure and overlooked American playwrights as well as some famous ones; it will be a welcome addition for collections specializing in the theater arts. "Reference Books Bulletin"

This directory and index, the first such volume devoted exclusively to contemporary black American dramatists, will have an important place in theatre collections. It captures and preserves an elusive part of artistic endeavor, giving access to literally thousands of dramatic works that would otherwise be lost to scholars and the public. Organized as an encyclopedia, it provides information on more than 600 noteworthy Black American playwrights whose plays have been written, produced, or published between 1950 and the present. The volume begins with an introductory essay surveying the history of contemporary black American drama. Playwrights, screenwriters, radio and television scriptwriters, and musical theatre collaborators are treated in individual entries that comprise the bulk of the book. The volume also supplies a bibliography of anthologies, books, and periodicals cited; mailing addresses for more than 200 of the playwrights; and title and subject indexes.

James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction is a study of all of Ellroy's key works, from his debut novel Brown's Requiem to the epic Underworld USA trilogy. This book traces the development of Ellroy's writing style and the importance of his Demon Dog persona to carving out his unique place in American crime fiction.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Willis Richardson (1889-1977) was highly respected as a leading African-American playwright and drama anthologist. His plays were performed by numerous black high school, college, and university drama groups and by theater companies in Chicago, New York, Washington D.C., Cleveland, Baltimore, and Atlanta. With the opening of "The Chip Woman's Fortune" (1923), he became the first African American to have a play produced on Broadway. Several of his 46 plays were published in assorted magazines, and in his essays, he urged black Americans to seek their dramatic material in their own lives and circumstances. In addition, he edited three anthologies of plays by African-Americans. But between 1940 and his death in 1977, Richardson came to realize that his plays were period pieces and that they no longer reflected the problems and situations of African-Americans. In the years before his death, he attempted vigorously yet unsuccessfully to preserve several of his plays through publication, if not production. But the man who has been called the father of African-American drama and who was considered the hope and promise of African-American drama died in obscurity.

Richardson has even been neglected by the scholarly community. This critical biography, the first extensive consideration of his life and work, firmly reestablishes his pioneering role in American theater. The book begins with a detailed chronology, followed by a thoughtful biographical essay. The volume then examines the nature of African-American drama in the 1920s, the period during which Richardson was most productive, and it analyzes his approach to drama as a means of educating African-American audiences. It then explores the African-American community as the central theme in Richardson's plays, for Richardson typically looks at the consequences of refusals by blacks to help one another. The work additionally considers Richardson's history plays, his anthologies, his dramas intended for black children, and his essays. A concluding chapter summarizes his lasting influence; the book closes with a listing of his plays and an extensive bibliography.

In Peter Handke's play Kaspar, a young man is forced to learn to speak: a process that is a form of physical torture to him. In Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, the young heroine desires to keep as silent as possible, since speech directed at her causes such pain. We are not allowed to remain silent, even when the cost of speech is torture and pain.
Silence and Subject in Modern Literature uses a wide variety of texts from forms such as the modern crime novel, via popular classics from authors such as Jane Austen, to avant-garde plays by Samuel Beckett and Handke, to study literary representations of the power relations in which we are forced to speak. Informed by critical theory by Foucault and Bakhtin among others, and touching on fields as diverse as rhetoric, feminism, and the concept of literature, Silence and Subject in Modern Literature engages closely with a central issue in modern life: spoken violence.

This bibliography of selected writings by 184 women authors from German-speaking countries will be a boon to teachers, students, reference librarians, and library selectors interested in women's literature. The bibliographic listings, many of them annotated, are preceded by a brief biography and critical assessment. The annotations offer concise summaries and commentary. . . . Coverage is broad, spanning 11 centuries, and including writers of diaries, polemics, essays, etc., . . . A necessary acquisition for all academic libraries. Choice Researchers in German literature and women's studies will be delighted with this new book by Else Frederiksen and thirty-five other contributors. Journal of English and Germanic Philology The literature by women writers in German-speaking countries is abundant and varied, yet it is almost undocumented in English. This annotated bio-bibliographical guide presents both factual and interpretive information on 185 Austrian, German (German Democratic Republic and Federal Republic of Germany after 1945), and Swiss women writers from the tenth century to the present. It is the largest collective research project on German-speaking women writers in English to date and among the most comprehensive in any language, including German. The volume concentrates on those authors who wrote and published primarily prose works, including those poets and dramatists who wrote prose. An important aspect of the volume is its inclusion of the so-called non-traditional genres, such as autobiographies, diaries, letters, travelogues, polemics, and essays--forms of writing that play such an important role in the literature by women and that provide particularly valuable insights into their social context. The selections are necessarily subjective, based on the contributors' critical perspectives and areas of interest, taking into account the development and the results of feminist literary criticism and scholarship in the last fifteen years. All entries are listed in alphabetical order in the main bibliography. The appendixes provide alternative means of access. A chronological list of authors by birthdate allows for a chronological reading of the author entries and should be helpful to readers interested in questions about a female literary continuum. The Classified List of Authors by Country will be useful to those interested primarily in any one of the German-speaking countries. Two title indexes list all titles mentioned in the volume in either German or in English translation. The list of selected secondary literature mentions all bibliographies and reference works used for the compilation of authors. It also includes theoretical and critical studies, works on women in the cultural context, and works on specific literary topics. Each author entry begins with the name of the author by which she is best known. A paragraph follows the author entry providing brief information on the author's life and her cultural and literary context. The paragraphs following the general description contain detailed bibliographical information for all listings. Annotations are provided for selected individual works. The volume will be of interest to anyone interested in the writings of women authors from Germany (the two Germanies after 1945), Austria, and Switzerland and it is a necessity for courses in Women's Studies and in German Literature.

How and when can a narrative agent or voice be considered unreliable? What happens when narrative authority fails and, just as importantly, why does it? As a means to answering these questions, Wandering Women in French Film and Literature examines the phenomenon of 'narrative drift' through in-depth analysis of twentieth-century novels and films. Combining feminist theories and structural narratology, Devereux Herbeck illustrates the ways in which evidence and/or admissions of doubt by narrative entities in works featuring wandering women disrupt conventions of continuity, coherence, and authority and thereby forces the story in new, unexpected directions.

The middlebrow is a dominant cultural force in the twenty-first century. This book defines the new literary middlebrow through eight key features: middle class, feminized, reverential, commercial, emotional, recreational, earnest and mediated. Case studies include Oprah's Book Club, the Man Booker Prize and the Harry Potter phenomenon.